US/NATO War on Russia

[Peter Lemkin]

On the Brink of War and Economic Collapse Paul Craig Roberts
December 12, 2014 @ 4:45 pm


On occasion a reader will ask if I can give readers some good news. The answer is: not unless I lie to you like "your" government and the mainstream media do. If you want faked "good news," you need to retreat into The Matrix. In exchange for less stress and worry, you will be led unknowingly into financial ruin and nuclear armageddon.
If you want to be forewarned, and possibly prepared, for what "your" government is bringing you, and have some small chance of redirecting the course of events, read and support this site. It is your site. I already know these things. I write for you.
The neoconservatives, a small group of warmongers strongly allied with the military/industrial complex and Israel, gave us Granada and the Contras affair in Nicaragua. President Reagan fired them, and they were prosecuted, but subsequently pardoned by Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush.
Ensconced in think tanks and protected by Israeli and military/security complex money, the neoconservatives reemerged in the Clinton administration and engineered the breakup of Yugoslavia, the war against Serbia, and the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders.
Neoconservatives dominated the George W. Bush regime. They controlled the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the Office of the Vice President, and much else. Neoconservatives gave us 9/11 and its coverup, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the beginning of the destabilizations of Pakistan and Yemen, the U.S. Africa Command, the invasion of South Ossetia by Georgia, the demise of the anti-ABM Treaty, unconstitutional and illegal spying on American citizens without warrants, loss of constitutional protections, torture, and the unaccountability of the executive branch to law, Congress, and the judiciary. In short, the neoconservatives laid the foundation for dictatorship and for WW III.
The Obama regime held no one accountable for the crimes of the Bush regime, thus creating the precedent that the executive branch is above the law. Instead, the Obama regime prosecuted whistleblowers who told the truth about government crimes.
Neoconservatives remain very influential in the Obama regime. As examples, Obama appointed neoconservative Susan Rice as his National Security Advisor. Obama appointed neoconservative Samantha Power as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Obama appointed neoconservative Victoria Nuland as Assistant Secretary of State. Nuland's office, working with the CIA and Washington-financed NGOs, organized the U.S. coup in Ukraine.
Neoconservatism is the only extant political ideology. The ideology is "America uber alles." Neoconservatives believe that History has chosen the United States to exercise hegemony over the world, thereby making the U.S. "exceptional" and "indispensable." Obama himself has declared as much. This ideology gives neoconservatives tremendous confidence and drive, just as Karl Marx's conclusion that history had chosen the workers to be the ruling class gave early communists confidence and drive.
This confidence and drive makes the neoconservatives reckless.
To advance their agenda neoconservatives propagandize the populations of the U.S. and Washington's vassal states. The presstitutes deliver the neoconservatives' lies to the unsuspecting public: Russia has invaded and annexed Ukrainian provinces; Putin intends to reconstitute the Soviet Empire; Russia is a gangster state without democracy; Russia is a threat to the Baltics, Poland, and all of Europe, necessitating a U.S./NATO military buildup on Russia's borders; China, a Russian ally, must be militarily contained with new U.S. naval and air bases surrounding China and controlling Chinese sea lanes.
The neoconservatives and President Obama have made it completely clear that the U.S. will not accept Russia and China as sovereign countries with economic and foreign policies independent of the interests of Washington. Russia and China are acceptable only as vassal states, like the UK, Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia.
Clearly, the neoconservative formula is a formula for the final war.
All of humanity is endangered by a handful of evil men and women ensconced in positions of power in Washington.
Anti-Russia propaganda has gone into high gear. Putin is the "new Hitler."
Daniel Zubov reports on a joint conference held by three U.S. think tanks.
The conference blamed Russia for the failures of Washington's foreign policy. Read this article: http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20141205/1015538604.html [SUP][1][/SUP] to see how neoconservatives operate in order to control the explanations. Even Henry Kissinger is under attack for stating the obvious truth that Russia has a legitimate interest in Ukraine, a land long part of Russia and located in Russia's legitimate sphere of influence.
Since the Clinton regime, Washington has been acting against Russian interests. In his forthcoming book, The Globalization of War: America's Long War against Humanity, Professor Michel Chossudovsky presents a realistic appraisal of how close Washington has brought the world to its demise in nuclear war. This passage is from the Preface:
"The globalization of war' is a hegemonic project. Major military
and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken
simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan
Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US military agenda
combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions
geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
"Under a global military agenda, the actions undertaken by the
Western military alliance (US-NATO-Israel) in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Palestine, Ukraine, Syria and Iraq are coordinated at the highest
levels of the military hierarchy. We are not dealing with
piecemeal military and intelligence operations. The July-August
2014 attack on Gaza by Israeli forces was undertaken in close consultation
with the United States and NATO. In turn, the actions in
Ukraine and their timing coincided with the onslaught of the attack
on Gaza.
"In turn, military undertakings are closely coordinated with a
process of economic warfare which consists not only in imposing
sanctions on sovereign countries but also in deliberate acts of destabilization
of financial and currency markets, with a view to undermining
the enemies' national economies.
"The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure
which threatens the future of humanity. As we go to press, US
and NATO forces have been deployed in Eastern Europe. US military
intervention under a humanitarian mandate is proceeding in sub-Saharan
Africa. The US and its allies are threatening China under President Obama's
Pivot to Asia'.
"In turn, military maneuvers are being conducted at Russia's
doorstep which could lead to escalation.
"The US airstrikes initiated in September 2014 directed against
Iraq and Syria under the pretext of going after the Islamic State are
part of a scenario of military escalation extending from North Africa
and the Eastern Mediterranean to Central and South Asia.
The Western military alliance is in an advanced state of readiness.
"And so is Russia."
As I have often remarked, Americans are an insouciant people. They are simply unaware. Suppose they were aware, suppose that the entire population understood the peril, could anything be done, or have the insouciant Americans fallen under the control of the police state that Washington has created?
I don't think there is much hope from the American people. The American people cannot tell genuine from fake leadership, and the ruling private elites will not permit real leaders to emerge. Moreover, there is no organized movement in opposition to the neoconservatives.
The hope comes from outside the political system. The hope is that the House of Cards and rigged markets erected by policymakers for the benefit of the One Percent collapses. David Stockman regards this outcome as a highly likely one. The collapse that Stockman sees as being on its way is the same collapse about which I have warned. Moreover, the number of Black Swans which can originate collapse are even more numerous than the ones Stockman correctly identifies. Some financial organizations are worried about a lack of liquidity in the fixed income (bonds) and derivatives markets. Barbara Novack, co-chair of Black Rock, is lobbying hard for a derivatives bailout mechanism.
David Stockman's article is important. Read it until you understand it, and you will know more than most everyone. http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/12/david...%E2%80%A8/ [SUP][2][/SUP]
Many will ask: If the wealth of the One Percent is vulnerable to economic collapse, will war be initiated to protect this wealth and to blame the Russians or Chinese for the hardships that engulf the American population? My answer is that the kind of collapse that I expect, and that David Stockman and no doubt others expect, presents government with such social, political, and economic insecurity that organizing for a major war becomes impossible.
Whereas the political impotence of the American people and the vassalage of the Western World impose no constraints on Washington, economic collapse brings revolutions and the demise of the existing order.
As hard as collapse would make it for people to survive, the chances for survival are higher than in the event of nuclear war.

[Lauren Johnson]

Needs verification. If so, could be highly significant.

http://en.eurasianunion.ch/2014/12/14/de...vorossiya/

[Magda Hassan]

Huge. Can't see why not if Kosovo, a case accepted by the Anglo Atlantic states, can do it. Will show up western hypocrisy on the 2 matters as well. Needs recognition by other states. I'm sure many will do just that. Collective and state ownership' recognition hey? I like it. And 'preventing excesses of private property and monopolies. Don't think the bankers and oligarchs will though. Sounds like a Transnistria type arrangement.

[Lauren Johnson]

Huge. Can't see why not if Kosovo, a case accepted by the Anglo Atlantic states, can do it. Will show up western hypocrisy on the 2 matters as well. Needs recognition by other states. I'm sure many will do just that. Collective and state ownership' recognition hey? I like it. And 'preventing excesses of private property and monopolies. Don't think the bankers and oligarchs will though. Sounds like a Transnistria type arrangement.

We have to remember that the official Russian position is the Novorussiya must remain a part of Ukraine. Also, the Kremlin did not originally support a Donbas resistance movement. So we have to to see if some hot heads just went and put up this on a website.

[Lauren Johnson]

A whole new future coming our way. Did you like bailing out the banks and the banksters. Wait 'til you get a load of a "bail-in."

December 14, 2014 "ICH" --On December 11, 2014, the US House passed a bill repealing the Dodd-Frank requirement that risky derivatives be pushed into big-bank subsidiaries, leaving our deposits and pensions exposed to massive derivatives losses. The bill was vigorously challenged by Senator Elizabeth Warren; but the tide turned when Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, stepped into the ring. Perhaps what prompted his intervention was the unanticipated $40 drop in the price of oil. As financial blogger Michael Snyder points out, that drop could trigger a derivatives payout that could bankrupt the biggest banks. And if the G20's new "bail-in" rules are formalized, depositors and pensioners could be on the hook. The new bail-in rules were discussed in my last post here. They are edicts of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an unelected body of central bankers and finance ministers headquartered in the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Where did the FSB get these sweeping powers, and is its mandate legally enforceable?

Those questions were addressed in an article I wrote in June 2009, two months after the FSB was formed, titled "Big Brother in Basel: BIS Financial Stability Board Undermines National Sovereignty." It linked the strange boot shape of the BIS to a line from Orwell's 1984: "a boot stamping on a human faceforever." The concerns raised there seem to be materializing, so I'm republishing the bulk of that article here. We need to be paying attention, lest the bail-in juggernaut steamroll over us unchallenged.

The Shadowy Financial Stability Board

Alarm bells went off in April 2009, when the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) was linked to the new Financial Stability Board (FSB) signed onto by the G20 leaders in London. The FSB was an expansion of the older Financial Stability Forum (FSF) set up in 1999 to serve in a merely advisory capacity by the G7 (a group of finance ministers formed from the seven major industrialized nations). The chair of the FSF was the General Manager of the BIS. The new FSB was expanded to include all G20 members (19 nations plus the EU).

Formally called the "Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors," the G20 was, like the G7, originally set up as a forum merely for cooperation and consultation on matters pertaining to the international financial system. What set off alarms was that the new Financial Stability Board had real teeth, imposing "obligations" and "commitments" on its members; and this feat was pulled off without legislative formalities, skirting the usual exacting requirements for treaties. It was all done in hasty response to an "emergency." Problem-reaction-solution was the slippery slope of coups.

Buried on page 83 of an 89-page Report on Financial Regulatory Reform issued by the US Obama administration was a recommendation that the FSB strengthen and institutionalize its mandate to promote global financial stability. It sounded like a worthy goal, but there was a disturbing lack of detail. What was the FSB's mandate, what were its expanded powers, and who was in charge? An article in The London Guardian addressed those issues in question and answer format:

Who runs the regulator? The Financial Stability Forum is chaired by Mario Draghi, governor of the Bank of Italy. The secretariat is based at the Bank for International Settlements' headquarters in Basel, Switzerland.

Draghi was director general of the Italian treasury from 1991 to 2001, where he was responsible for widespread privatization (sell-off of government holdings to private investors). From 2002 to 2006, he was a partner at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street. He was succeeded in 2011 by Mark Carney, who also got his start at Goldman Sachs, working there for 13 years before going on to become Governor of the Bank of Canada in 2008 and Governor of the Bank of England in 2012. In 2011 and 2012, Carney attended the annual meetings of the controversial Bilderberg Group.

What will the new regulator do? The regulator will monitor potential risks to the economy . . . It will cooperate with the IMF, the Washington-based body that monitors countries' financial health, lending funds if needed.

The IMF is an international banking organization that is also controversial. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank, charged it with ensnaring Third World countries in a debt trap from which they could not escape. Debtors unable to pay were bound by "conditionalities" that included a forced sell-off of national assets to private investors in order to service their loans.

What will the regulator oversee? All systemically important' financial institutions, instruments and markets.

The term "systemically important" was not defined. Would it include such systemically important institutions as national treasuries, and such systemically important markets as gold, oil and food?

How will it work? The body will establish a supervisory college to monitor each of the largest international financial services firms. . . . It will act as a clearing house for information-sharing and contingency planning for the benefit of its members.

"Information-sharing" can mean illegal collusion. Would the information-sharing here include such things as secret agreements among central banks to buy or sell particular currencies, with the concomitant power to support or collapse targeted local economies?

What will the new regulator do about debt and loans? To prevent another debt bubble, the new body will recommend financial companies maintain provisions against credit losses and may impose constraints on borrowing.

What sort of constraints? The Basel Accords, imposed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (also housed at the BIS) had not necessarily worked out well. The first Basel Accord, issued in 1998, had been blamed for inducing a recession in Japan from which that country had yet to recover; and the Second Basel Accord and its associated mark-to-market rule had been blamed for bringing on the 2008 crisis. (For more on this, see The Public Bank Solution.)

The Amorphous 12 International Standards and Codes

Most troubling, perhaps, was this vague parenthetical reference in a press release issued by the BIS, titled "Financial Stability Forum Re-established as the Financial Stability Board":

As obligations of membership, member countries and territories commit to . . . implement international financial standards (including the 12 key International Standards and Codes) . . . .

This was not just friendly advice from an advisory board. It was a commitment to comply, so you would expect some detailed discussion concerning what those standards entailed. But a search of the major media revealed virtually nothing. The 12 key International Standards and Codes were left undefined and undiscussed. The FSB website listed them, but it was vague. The Standards and Codes covered broad areas that were apparently subject to modification as the overseeing committees saw fit. They included money and financial policy transparency, fiscal policy transparency, data dissemination, insolvency, corporate governance, accounting, auditing, payment and settlement, market integrity, banking supervision, securities regulation, and insurance supervision.

Take "fiscal policy transparency" as an example. The "Code of Good Practices on Fiscal Transparency" was adopted by the IMF Interim Committee in 1998. The "synoptic description" said:

The code contains transparency requirements to provide assurances to the public and to capital markets that a sufficiently complete picture of the structure and finances of government is available so as to allow the soundness of fiscal policy to be reliably assessed.
Members were required to provide a "picture of the structure and finances of government" that was complete enough for an assessment of its "soundness" but an assessment by whom, and what if a government failed the test? Was an unelected private committee based in the BIS allowed to evaluate the "structure and function" of particular national governments and, if they were determined to have fiscal policies that were not "sound," to impose "conditionalities" and "austerity measures" of the sort that the IMF was notorious for imposing on Third World countries? Suspicious observers wondered if that was how once-mighty nations were to be brought under the heel of Big Brother at last.

For three centuries, private international banking interests have brought governments in line by blocking them from issuing their own currencies and requiring them to borrow banker-issued "banknotes" instead. Political colonialism is now a thing of the past, but under the new FSB guidelines, nations could still be held in feudalistic subservience to foreign masters.

Consider this scenario: the new FSB rules precipitate a massive global depression due to contraction of the money supply. XYZ country wakes up to the fact that all of this is unnecessary that it could be creating its own money, freeing itself from the debt trap, rather than borrowing from bankers who create money on computer screens and charge interest for the privilege of borrowing it. But this realization comes too late: the boot descends and XYZ is crushed into line. National sovereignty has been abdicated to a private committee, with no say by the voters.

Marilyn Barnewall, dubbed by Forbes Magazine the "dean of American private banking," wrote in an April 2009 article titled "What Happened to American Sovereignty at G-20?":

It seems the world's bankers have executed a bloodless coup and now represent all of the people in the world. . . . President Obama agreed at the G20 meeting in London to create an international board with authority to intervene in U.S. corporations by dictating executive compensation and approving or disapproving business management decisions. Under the new Financial Stability Board, the United States has only one vote. In other words, the group will be largely controlled by European central bankers. My guess is, they will represent themselves, not you and not me and certainly not America.

The Commitments Mandated by the Financial Stability Board Constitute a Commercial Treaty Requiring a Two-thirds Vote of the Senate

Are these commitments legally binding? Adoption of the FSB was never voted on by the public, either individually or through their legislators. The G20 Summit has been called "a New Bretton Woods," referring to agreements entered into in 1944 establishing new rules for international trade. But Bretton Woods was put in place by Congressional Executive Agreement, requiring a majority vote of the legislature; and it more properly should have been done by treaty, requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate, since it was an international agreement binding on the nation.

"Bail-in" is not the law yet, but the G20 governments will be called upon to adopt the FSB's resolution measures when the proposal is finalized after taking comments in 2015. The authority of the G20 has been challenged, but mainly over whether important countries were left out of the mix. The omitted countries may prove to be the lucky ones, having avoided the FSB's net.

[Magda Hassan]

Huge. Can't see why not if Kosovo, a case accepted by the Anglo Atlantic states, can do it. Will show up western hypocrisy on the 2 matters as well. Needs recognition by other states. I'm sure many will do just that. Collective and state ownership' recognition hey? I like it. And 'preventing excesses of private property and monopolies. Don't think the bankers and oligarchs will though. Sounds like a Transnistria type arrangement.

We have to remember that the official Russian position is the Novorussiya must remain a part of Ukraine. Also, the Kremlin did not originally support a Donbas resistance movement. So we have to to see if some hot heads just went and put up this on a website.

Indeed. I hope Russia does comes on board though. The US and UK will never be satisfied until all of it is dismembered and on a plate for them to pick over.

[David Guyatt]

A whole new future coming our way. Did you like bailing out the banks and the banksters. Wait 'til you get a load of a "bail-in."

December 14, 2014 "ICH" --On December 11, 2014, the US House passed a bill repealing the Dodd-Frank requirement that risky derivatives be pushed into big-bank subsidiaries, leaving our deposits and pensions exposed to massive derivatives losses. The bill was vigorously challenged by Senator Elizabeth Warren; but the tide turned when Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, stepped into the ring. Perhaps what prompted his intervention was the unanticipated $40 drop in the price of oil. As financial blogger Michael Snyder points out, that drop could trigger a derivatives payout that could bankrupt the biggest banks. And if the G20's new "bail-in" rules are formalized, depositors and pensioners could be on the hook. The new bail-in rules were discussed in my last post here. They are edicts of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an unelected body of central bankers and finance ministers headquartered in the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Where did the FSB get these sweeping powers, and is its mandate legally enforceable?

Those questions were addressed in an article I wrote in June 2009, two months after the FSB was formed, titled "Big Brother in Basel: BIS Financial Stability Board Undermines National Sovereignty." It linked the strange boot shape of the BIS to a line from Orwell's 1984: "a boot stamping on a human faceforever." The concerns raised there seem to be materializing, so I'm republishing the bulk of that article here. We need to be paying attention, lest the bail-in juggernaut steamroll over us unchallenged.

The Shadowy Financial Stability Board

Alarm bells went off in April 2009, when the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) was linked to the new Financial Stability Board (FSB) signed onto by the G20 leaders in London. The FSB was an expansion of the older Financial Stability Forum (FSF) set up in 1999 to serve in a merely advisory capacity by the G7 (a group of finance ministers formed from the seven major industrialized nations). The chair of the FSF was the General Manager of the BIS. The new FSB was expanded to include all G20 members (19 nations plus the EU).

Formally called the "Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors," the G20 was, like the G7, originally set up as a forum merely for cooperation and consultation on matters pertaining to the international financial system. What set off alarms was that the new Financial Stability Board had real teeth, imposing "obligations" and "commitments" on its members; and this feat was pulled off without legislative formalities, skirting the usual exacting requirements for treaties. It was all done in hasty response to an "emergency." Problem-reaction-solution was the slippery slope of coups.

Buried on page 83 of an 89-page Report on Financial Regulatory Reform issued by the US Obama administration was a recommendation that the FSB strengthen and institutionalize its mandate to promote global financial stability. It sounded like a worthy goal, but there was a disturbing lack of detail. What was the FSB's mandate, what were its expanded powers, and who was in charge? An article in The London Guardian addressed those issues in question and answer format:

Who runs the regulator? The Financial Stability Forum is chaired by Mario Draghi, governor of the Bank of Italy. The secretariat is based at the Bank for International Settlements' headquarters in Basel, Switzerland.

Draghi was director general of the Italian treasury from 1991 to 2001, where he was responsible for widespread privatization (sell-off of government holdings to private investors). From 2002 to 2006, he was a partner at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street. He was succeeded in 2011 by Mark Carney, who also got his start at Goldman Sachs, working there for 13 years before going on to become Governor of the Bank of Canada in 2008 and Governor of the Bank of England in 2012. In 2011 and 2012, Carney attended the annual meetings of the controversial Bilderberg Group.

What will the new regulator do? The regulator will monitor potential risks to the economy . . . It will cooperate with the IMF, the Washington-based body that monitors countries' financial health, lending funds if needed.

The IMF is an international banking organization that is also controversial. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank, charged it with ensnaring Third World countries in a debt trap from which they could not escape. Debtors unable to pay were bound by "conditionalities" that included a forced sell-off of national assets to private investors in order to service their loans.

What will the regulator oversee? All systemically important' financial institutions, instruments and markets.

The term "systemically important" was not defined. Would it include such systemically important institutions as national treasuries, and such systemically important markets as gold, oil and food?

How will it work? The body will establish a supervisory college to monitor each of the largest international financial services firms. . . . It will act as a clearing house for information-sharing and contingency planning for the benefit of its members.

"Information-sharing" can mean illegal collusion. Would the information-sharing here include such things as secret agreements among central banks to buy or sell particular currencies, with the concomitant power to support or collapse targeted local economies?

What will the new regulator do about debt and loans? To prevent another debt bubble, the new body will recommend financial companies maintain provisions against credit losses and may impose constraints on borrowing.

What sort of constraints? The Basel Accords, imposed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (also housed at the BIS) had not necessarily worked out well. The first Basel Accord, issued in 1998, had been blamed for inducing a recession in Japan from which that country had yet to recover; and the Second Basel Accord and its associated mark-to-market rule had been blamed for bringing on the 2008 crisis. (For more on this, see The Public Bank Solution.)

The Amorphous 12 International Standards and Codes

Most troubling, perhaps, was this vague parenthetical reference in a press release issued by the BIS, titled "Financial Stability Forum Re-established as the Financial Stability Board":

As obligations of membership, member countries and territories commit to . . . implement international financial standards (including the 12 key International Standards and Codes) . . . .

This was not just friendly advice from an advisory board. It was a commitment to comply, so you would expect some detailed discussion concerning what those standards entailed. But a search of the major media revealed virtually nothing. The 12 key International Standards and Codes were left undefined and undiscussed. The FSB website listed them, but it was vague. The Standards and Codes covered broad areas that were apparently subject to modification as the overseeing committees saw fit. They included money and financial policy transparency, fiscal policy transparency, data dissemination, insolvency, corporate governance, accounting, auditing, payment and settlement, market integrity, banking supervision, securities regulation, and insurance supervision.

Take "fiscal policy transparency" as an example. The "Code of Good Practices on Fiscal Transparency" was adopted by the IMF Interim Committee in 1998. The "synoptic description" said:

The code contains transparency requirements to provide assurances to the public and to capital markets that a sufficiently complete picture of the structure and finances of government is available so as to allow the soundness of fiscal policy to be reliably assessed.
Members were required to provide a "picture of the structure and finances of government" that was complete enough for an assessment of its "soundness" but an assessment by whom, and what if a government failed the test? Was an unelected private committee based in the BIS allowed to evaluate the "structure and function" of particular national governments and, if they were determined to have fiscal policies that were not "sound," to impose "conditionalities" and "austerity measures" of the sort that the IMF was notorious for imposing on Third World countries? Suspicious observers wondered if that was how once-mighty nations were to be brought under the heel of Big Brother at last.

For three centuries, private international banking interests have brought governments in line by blocking them from issuing their own currencies and requiring them to borrow banker-issued "banknotes" instead. Political colonialism is now a thing of the past, but under the new FSB guidelines, nations could still be held in feudalistic subservience to foreign masters.

Consider this scenario: the new FSB rules precipitate a massive global depression due to contraction of the money supply. XYZ country wakes up to the fact that all of this is unnecessary that it could be creating its own money, freeing itself from the debt trap, rather than borrowing from bankers who create money on computer screens and charge interest for the privilege of borrowing it. But this realization comes too late: the boot descends and XYZ is crushed into line. National sovereignty has been abdicated to a private committee, with no say by the voters.

Marilyn Barnewall, dubbed by Forbes Magazine the "dean of American private banking," wrote in an April 2009 article titled "What Happened to American Sovereignty at G-20?":

It seems the world's bankers have executed a bloodless coup and now represent all of the people in the world. . . . President Obama agreed at the G20 meeting in London to create an international board with authority to intervene in U.S. corporations by dictating executive compensation and approving or disapproving business management decisions. Under the new Financial Stability Board, the United States has only one vote. In other words, the group will be largely controlled by European central bankers. My guess is, they will represent themselves, not you and not me and certainly not America.

The Commitments Mandated by the Financial Stability Board Constitute a Commercial Treaty Requiring a Two-thirds Vote of the Senate

Are these commitments legally binding? Adoption of the FSB was never voted on by the public, either individually or through their legislators. The G20 Summit has been called "a New Bretton Woods," referring to agreements entered into in 1944 establishing new rules for international trade. But Bretton Woods was put in place by Congressional Executive Agreement, requiring a majority vote of the legislature; and it more properly should have been done by treaty, requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate, since it was an international agreement binding on the nation.

"Bail-in" is not the law yet, but the G20 governments will be called upon to adopt the FSB's resolution measures when the proposal is finalized after taking comments in 2015. The authority of the G20 has been challenged, but mainly over whether important countries were left out of the mix. The omitted countries may prove to be the lucky ones, having avoided the FSB's net.

The oil price drop is the result of a market manipulated by six brokers. In short, it has been used to push prices higher and bleed people when wanted, or push them lower to bleed Russia - as is the case at present.

The BIS is a body historically established to do the bidding of central banks, who in turn are there go do the bidding of investment banks (the modern title of merchant banks).

What we have in the opt-in is a complete and utter repudiation of western capitalist principles.

The private roulette table has just been backed by every citizens savings and pensions. You just all became the "chips" that the elect players use to gamble; they're far too smart to use their own money as they could lose it. They don't care about losing yours.

And to think that the crooked Jamie Dimon was the one who swayed the vote. Yes, sure he was. This has been in the pipeline for several years.

[Lauren Johnson]

Huge. Can't see why not if Kosovo, a case accepted by the Anglo Atlantic states, can do it. Will show up western hypocrisy on the 2 matters as well. Needs recognition by other states. I'm sure many will do just that. Collective and state ownership' recognition hey? I like it. And 'preventing excesses of private property and monopolies. Don't think the bankers and oligarchs will though. Sounds like a Transnistria type arrangement.

We have to remember that the official Russian position is the Novorussiya must remain a part of Ukraine. Also, the Kremlin did not originally support a Donbas resistance movement. So we have to to see if some hot heads just went and put up this on a website.

The notion of independence for the Donbas is almost certainly a non-starter given what Lavrov is saying.

[Lauren Johnson]

Russia on the ropes? Something's got to give. The ruble is in free fall and the Russia Central Bank raises rates from 10.5% to 17%! The Moscow Times implies there should be a coup to get rid of Putin. That's my read although that is not literally what it is calling for. (The MT is very pro-western.)

[Magda Hassan]

Seems to be working as far as halting the slide goes. Why waste valuable foreign reserves on trying to save the currency? And the Euro zone will go down with Russia if it goes. I suppose the main question is Putin's durability. He is huge in the opinion polls there but for sure they have Khodorovsky waiting in the wings maybe others too.